This characteristic scene, which has delayed me overlong, was but a moment in that day of exercise and agitation.  To fit out a schooner for sea, and improvise a marriage between dawn and dusk, involves heroic effort.  All day Jim and I ran, and tramped, and laughed, and came near crying, and fell in sudden anxious consultations, and were sped (with a prepared sarcasm on our lips) to some fallacious milliner, and made dashes to the schooner and John Smith’s, and at every second corner were reminded (by our own huge posters) of our desperate estate.  Between whiles, I had found the time to hover at some half-a-dozen jewellers’ windows; and my present, thus intemperately chosen, was graciously accepted.  I believe, indeed, that was the last (though not the least) of my concerns, before the old minister, shabby and benign, was routed from his house and led to the office like a performing poodle; and there, in the growing dusk, under the cold glitter of Thirteen Star, two hundred strong, and beside the garish glories of the agricultural engine, Mamie and Jim were made one.  The scene was incongruous, but the business pretty, whimsical, and affecting:  the typewriters with such kindly faces and fine posies, Mamie so demure, and Jim—­how shall I describe that poor, transfigured Jim?  He began by taking the minister aside to the far end of the office.  I knew not what he said, but I have reason to believe he was protesting his unfitness; for he wept as he said it:  and the old minister, himself genuinely moved, was heard to console and encourage him, and at one time to use this expression:  “I assure you, Mr. Pinkerton, there are not many who can say so much”—­from which I gathered that my friend had tempered his self-accusations with at least one legitimate boast.  From this ghostly counselling, Jim turned to me; and though he never got beyond the explosive utterance of my name and one fierce handgrip, communicated some of his own emotion, like a charge of electricity, to his best man.  We stood up to the ceremony at last, in a general and kindly discomposure.  Jim was all abroad; and the divine himself betrayed his sympathy in voice and demeanour, and concluded with a fatherly allocution, in which he congratulated Mamie (calling her “my dear”) upon the fortune of an excellent husband, and protested he had rarely married a more interesting couple.  At this stage, like a glory descending, there was handed in, ex machina, the card of Douglas B. Longhurst, with congratulations and four dozen Perrier-Jouet.  A bottle was opened; and the minister pledged the bride, and the bridesmaids simpered and tasted, and I made a speech with airy bacchanalianism, glass in hand.  But poor Jim must leave the wine untasted.  “Don’t touch it,” I had found the opportunity to whisper; “in your state it will make you as drunk as a fiddler.”  And Jim had wrung my hand with a “God bless you, Loudon!—­saved me again!”

Hard following upon this, the supper passed off at Frank’s with somewhat tremulous gaiety.  And thence, with one half of the Perrier-Jouet—­I would accept no more—­we voyaged in a hack to the Norah Creina.